Jun 12 2013
Twenty students and five teachers from Susquehanna Township High School will study biofuel technology at Penn State Harrisburg June 23 - June 28 as part of a continuing national, state and local, effort to interest young people in the STEM disciplines.
STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – has become a focus of educational efforts to keep the next generation competitive in a world economy.
The program is a joint effort by the Capital Area Institute for Mathematics and Science (CAIMS), Penn State Harrisburg, and the Penn State College of Medicine. Students and teachers attend free of charge through a Science Education Partnership Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
This is the last year of the five-year, $1.5 million grant, which has also benefitted students from Middletown, Steelton-Highspire, and East Pennsboro high schools.
The Susquehanna rising juniors will live in the Penn State Harrisburg residence halls and study in its state-of-the-art, 3,000-square-foot biofuels lab. The Central Pennsylvania Research and Teaching Laboratory for Biofuels was completed on campus in 2011. Students will also spend one day at the College of Medicine in Hershey, working with researchers in microbiology.
Their teachers will join them all week, serving as chaperones and learning science techniques they can take back to their classrooms.
Sixteen of the students participated in a CAIMS program last summer at the Juniata College environmental center at Raystown Lake. They were selected by blind review of 40 applications.
“This provides an unusual experience of college life in an actual working lab,” said CAIMS Director Judith Witmer. “It's really a wonderful opportunity to introduce students into STEM.” With the NIH grant ending this year, Witmer said her organization will look for other ways to provide hands-on learning experiences.
Steelton-Highspire school students will spend two non-residential weeks in the CAIMS program this summer. From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. June 10 to 14, they will study engineering topics in Penn State Harrisburg laboratories. From June 17 to 21, they will be in the research laboratories in the College of Medicine studying cancer biology and pharmacology.